January 2012
2 posts
Why The Vasa Sunk [pdf] - A case study for anyone... →
Oracle Provider Gets EF Support →
Oracle has recently released Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) 11.2 Rel 4 with support for Entity Framework 4.1 and 4.2. This will allow .NET developers working with Oracle database to work with a…
December 2011
43 posts
Show-MessageBox.ps1 →
<# .SYNOPSIS This script displays a message box and then processes it .DESCRIPTION This script firsts creates a wscript.shell object and invokes the popup…
Shadowcasting in C#, Part Six →
OK, let’s finish up this year and this series. We have an algorithm that can compute what cells in the zero octant are in view to a viewer at the origin when given a function that determines…
LinkedIn Open Sources IndexTank, a Customizable... →
LinkedIn has open sourced IndexTank, a document indexing engine that runs on the cloud and lets users customize the indexing process and tweak the results. By Abel Avram
Presentation: On Distributed Failures (and... →
Blake Mizerany presents various ways that can lead to system failure in distributed systems and how to recover using Doozer, a highly available, consistent data store. By Blake Mizerany
Google Releases Mac Management Tools →
Google has a lot of Macs to manage. While Macs haven’t caught up to Windows PCs in the workplace, there are no doubt quite a few admins that are managing quite a few Macs – and looking for…
Actual elevator algorithms (740 points; 210... →
Mono In 2011 →
In an year end post, Miguel de Icaza takes us through the major milestones for Mono in 2011. We present a summary here with the timeline. By Roopesh Shenoy
Presentation: Dart: A Structured Web Programming... →
Gilad Bracha introduces Dart, Google’s new language for the web, explaining the reasons behind its conception, what it is and what it is not, some of the main features, and unveiling plans for the…
Check Your Site Speed with Google Analytics →
Google has been working on adding a site speed report to Google Analytics for some time, but this week they made it available to all users by default. No additional code necessary, just…
Shadowcasting in C#, Part Four →
Last time we saw how many different ways there were to get the calculation of the top cell based on the top vector wrong. Today we’ll take a briefer look at determining the bottom cell. We know…
Presentation: Code2Cloud: Automating The Whole... →
Ryan Slobojan presents Code2Cloud used to automatically set up a number of tools useful for development and deployment: Hudson, Git, task repository, wiki, Cloud Foundry Deployment Services and…
GitHub's Janky Goes Open Source →
With little fanfare, GitHub has released Janky under the MIT license. Janky is a continuous integration (CI) server that runs on top of Jenkins and Hubot, designed to work with projects…
Shadowcasting in C#, Part Three →
Before we get started, thanks for all the great comments to the previous couple of posts. I’ll be updating the algorithm to try to make even better-looking circles of light based on the comments….
Code Signing For Individual Developers →
Code Signing is a mechanism for software users to trust executable code that is published on the internet before downloading and running it. Until now, this was practically beyond the reach of the…
Why is one loop so much slower than two loops?... →
Sensor Networks - GEOCens finished its Pilot Phase →
In December the GEOCens (Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing) is finishing its pilot phase, as the not-for-profit organization Cybera has recently published at GISUser.com. The…
Create Subway Maps with jQuery Plugin →
There’s something very appealing about the design of the London Underground (PDF) Tube maps. The design has spawned plenty of spinoffs, and is in demand for all types of projects. If…
Shadowcasting in C#, Part Two →
I hope the basic idea of the shadow casting algorithm is now clear. Let’s start to implement the thing. There are two main concerns to deal with. The easy one is “what should the interface to the…
Can SAP HANA boost Real-time Data Analytics? →
In a recent press news from 13th December, SAP announced at the SAP Influencer Summit in Boston that “leading software vendors are adopting the open SAP HANA platform for their existing products and…
Presentation: The Mapping Dilemma →
David Nolen critiques the tools, languages and methodologies used today from the perspective of solving the “mapping dilemma”, introducing match, a pattern matching library for Clojure. By David…
Requiem for Silverlight →
There are some products that appear to have been doomed to circumstance since birth - that despite the most ambitious goals, the grandest intentions, and often the wildest strokes of luck,…
Windows Store Requires Processor Types to Be... →
Microsoft has released the certification requirements for Metro style apps sold at the Windows Store. They range from technical specifications to strict controls on content. Not even processor types…
vim: revisited (248 points; 55 comments) →
Silverlight 5 – Full 3D Stack, Better Binding,... →
Silverlight 5 has finally been released by Microsoft, with a lot of new features such as full 3d stack with XNA Libraries, several binding related enhancements, unrestricted File System access and…
Shadowcasting in C#, Part One →
I’ve always loved the “roguelike” games; perhaps you’ve played some of them. Those are the games where you get a top-down view of a tile-based world, and have as much real time as you like to…
Quick-sort algorithm depicted in Hungarian... →
Why Firefox Isn't Doomed →
This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff…
Get-PortAndProtocolFromUrl.ps1 →
<# .SYNOPSIS This script strips out a port and protocol number from a URL .DESCRIPTION This script creates a regular expression reged then uses it to match…
Announcing the 6th Annual QCon London: March 5-9,... →
QCon London 2012, taking place March 5-9, 2012 is now open for registration (£ 295 savings until Dec 16th). There is no other event in the UK with similar opportunities for learning, networking, and…
Silverlight 5 Goes Live, No Word as to Finality →
When Microsoft premiered Silverlight as something called WPF/E in 2007, it was with the idea of enabling developers to build “rich Internet applications,” and to conceivably run them outside…
Roguelike people →
No technology today. Rather, some advice. I don’t know if there’s some sort of grifter convention going on, but I have seen four different short-con artists operating in Wallingford, the…
HP Has Decided to Open Source webOS →
HP will open source webOS along with Enyo, and promises to remain active in its development. By Abel Avram
Infographic: What Tools Developers Actually Use →
The folks at BestVendor.com interviewed 500 developers and compiled this profile of the tools that they actually use. A few stalwarts predominate, such as Git, Eclipse, AWS, Dropbox, MySQL,…
So many interfaces, part two →
In my earlier article from April 2011 on interface implementation I noted that C# supports a seldom-used feature called “interface re-implementation”. This feature is useful when you need it…
Presentation: Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j →
Michael Hunger discusses graph databases and the need for them in the larger context of NoSQL data stores, introducing Spring Data, Neo4j, and Spring Data Neo4j. By Michael Hunger
The Fruit of SproutCore's Labor Will Live On as... →
Last month, the team responsible for the creation of SproutCore, one of the more successful of many JavaScript libraries for Web application development, were absorbed as a whole into…
Confirm-ValidEmailAddress.ps1 →
<# .SYNOPSIS This script validates email addresses based on MSFT published Regular Expression. This is a re-write with PowerShell of an existing bit of MSDN…
Microsoft: Windows Store Developer Agreement... →
Since last September, Microsoft has promised that the legal-ese in its Windows Store terms would be straightforward. Thus far, the company has lived up to that promise with an App Developer…
Google brings Dart bindings and Multi-VM support... →
Google’s Vijay Menon announced on the WebKit developers mailing list the creation of a branch that would add support for multiple runtimes and ready made bindings for the Dart language. Other…
Brainfuck in One Line of Python (464 points; 141... →
What's the difference? Remainder vs Modulus →
Today, another episode of my ongoing series “What’s the difference?” Today, what’s the difference between a remainder and a modulus, and which, if either, does the % operator represent in C#?
Presentation: SoundCloud →
Eric Wahlforss shares his thoughts on what’s great and not so great in building a company’s identity and culture related to communication, relations, the right people, technologies, Agile, etc.. By…
TIBCO's ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Emerges Winner... →
PushToTest released the results of their 2011 analysis of SOA development and deployment solutions from IBM, Oracle and TIBCO which declared TIBCO the winner on multiple facets of productivity….
November 2011
52 posts
Preview of Visual Studio 11: Wither Performance? →
Previous articles in our mini-series on the upcoming Visual Studio 11 have discussed new features of the supported programming languages and the IDE. Today we’ll take a look at another important…
Why have a stack? →
Last time I discussed why it is that we have all the .NET compilers target an “intermediate language”, or “IL”, and then have jitters that translate IL to machine code: because doing so…
"When you get right down to it, most security is... →
IBM's Andy Piper (Part 3): The Taxonomy of All... →
Every addressable resource on the Web has what W3C now calls a Uniform Resource Identifier (not URL, but URI). Anything that can provide information to a client in response to a request, may…
New DAX Editor Simplifies PowerPivot Formula... →
Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a language used to construct formulas in PowerPivot tables and Excel PivotTables. Until this point there hasn’t been an editor for DAX that supports syntax…